“Painting is an open window to the world; anything not visible is not of interest to the painter”. Panayiotis Tetsis would not hesitate to subscribe to these axioms of Alberti which mark the start of the later tradition of Western art since 1435. Indeed, Tetsis remains one of the last exponents of painting of the gaze. His gaze, however, is neither innocent nor academic. It has been nurtured by a long tradition of painting, stemming from the Venetian masters of the 16th century — Tiziano and Veronese — and going through Greco, Rubens, Chardin and Delacroix to reach Matisse, Vuillard, Bonnard or even Rothko. You may observe that the painters in Tetsis’ “imaginary museum” are all colourists.

A review of the modern Greek tradition of painting makes it evident that colour is not its primary attribute. Some short breaks of chromatic burst notwithstanding, Greek painting has always promoted line instead of colour, thus opting for a more spiritual, cerebral dialogue with the world, as aptly remarked in a well-known article by Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, a typical exponent of the 1930s generation. It was exactly this so-called 1930s generation that reinstated the order which had been upset by the first, purely landscape-oriented generation of Greek modernism in the first three decades of this century. The early Parthenis, Maleas, Michalis Economou, N. Lytras and Papaloukas measured themselves against the hard Greek light and came up with an authentically colourful school of landscape, after the example of Cézanne and post-Impressionism. The 1930s generation was more ascetic and more intellectual, with the exception of Diamantopoulos and the early Tsarouchis. Besides, similar trends can be observed all over Europe.

Another trait of the 1930s generation was a switch back to the endemic anthropocentrism from which the previous generation had temporarily escaped. This is not to say that the landscape is altogether absent from these painters’ themes: it is just that the exponents of the 1930s generation and their successors focused on the urban (and often the inhabited) environment and interpreted it through visual codes (Vassiliou, Tsarouchis, Asteriadis, G. Manoussakis et al). The struggle of the first generation of landscapists to discover the chromatic ideogram of Greek light and the “Greek Line”, according to the wish expressed by Periklis Yannopoulos (1903), was foreign and remote to them. The second Greek modernism of the 1930s generation had different ideological obsessions: to demonstrate the active and ‘modern’ teachings of a tradition which spans the period from Byzantine times to folk art, Theofilos and the popular shadow theatre. Tradition and modern art acted as two-way catalysts for that generation, with one helping in the other’s understanding, re-evaluation or appropriation.

Panayiotis Tetsis reached his maturity in the 1950s, when abstraction had already began to infiltrate and take hold of the Greek art scene (Kontopoulos, Marthas, Spyropoulos). Tetsis was the same age as the generation of the avant-garde revolution, the generation of the ‘patricides’; a mass exodus from a post-civil war Greece and a rejection of all traditions, older or recent. The School of Fine Arts was for the revolutionaries the stronghold of academism and corvervatism. The exponents of that generation emigrated to the major art centres in Europe and America and received the subversive trends of that time in an active and constructive way – Kessanlis, Kaniaris, Tsoklis, Daniil, Koulentianos, Takis, et al. Tetsis does not share the rage, the dispute or the rejection. He speaks of his teachers with respect and soberly evaluates the achievements of his predecessors. Above all, he insists on serving a painting of the gaze, despite the overwhelming dominance of non-figurative trends in Europe and America, and mounts “a clear, deliberate resistance against abstraction”. This was noted by Angelos Prokopiou in the favourable review he wrote about the young painter’s exhibition at the “Zygos” Gallery in 1958, immediately after his return from Paris (“Kathimerini” newspaper, 2/3/1958).

It is to this resistance, to this insistence on painting what he sees, to this daily exercise of his gaze, to this constant search for ways to translate into colours the conversation between light and the world, to this necessary and always renewed struggle that the painting of Tetsis owes its uniqueness. For this dialogue was not without risk and difficulties; the terms the artist imposed upon himself made for an uncertain outcome of the dialogue. Tetsis is a painter of chromatic richness, of the lust of colours. The Greek light, according to the painter, “democratically levels” all hues and causes the vivid colours to fade. How can you remain faithful to two rival lovers – the painting of the gaze, which has to measure itself against a ruthless light, and the painting of colours, which aspires to preserve the clarity and intensity of tones? This artist managed to win this battle and produce Greek painting that is phototropic and chromatic at the same time.

| have called Tetsis a “hedonic Elpenor” of Greek painting. His painting is magical, at the same time pleasing our eyes and soul and training our gaze to seek revelation into trivial things. Indeed, true to the modernist tradition, Tetsis has no privileged themes: a theme is to him a simple stimulus – a motif. The composition, always firmly organized, colour and the good craftsman’s inimitable metier can turn the most mundane motif into a memorable visual happening. All themes can have a place in the works of Tetsis: from a simple jar with brushes on a table to the geometry of the island of Hydra as the first sun embraces it and the last one bids it goodbye, or the Friday street market in Xenokratous Street which served as an inspiration for his monumental, 50m-long frieze.

The painting of Tetsis is never descriptive or imitative. The viewer is called upon to reconstruct with his own senses the image that stimulated the painter, at the same time enjoying the creative process, the work’s visible poetics. This legible – but no less magical for that – poetics of Tetsis serve to confirm that his painting has assimilated all the conquests of painting in this century. This is why the viewer’s gaze will often hover between familiar reality and abstraction.

Still, this is not what concerns the painter. His real effort is to chromatically stimulate with his unique technical alchemy every inch of the painted surface and manage to convey the same thrill to the gaze which peruses it. In my monograph on Panayiotis Tetsis of almost ten years back (Nees Morfes Gallery publication, 1990) I had attempted to trace the laws and ways of this alchemy. Here, I shall leave this task to my dear colleague Antonis Kotidis.

As assistant professor of freehand drawing at the University under his friend Nikos Hadjikyriakos- Ghikas, as teacher at the Vakalo School and as professor at the School of Fine Arts, Panayiotis Tetsis was able to transmit his passion and his knowledge to many younger artists. Many of his students received from their teacher, along with the secrets of a nearly extinct metier, his love for the painting of the gaze. This is perhaps the teacher’s most valuable legacy at a time when the gaze is in danger of atrophying into a passive consumer of television images.

A retrospective exhibition of Panayiotis Tetsis had long been decided unanimously as tribute to a worthy and eminent artist, long before he announced his generous offer to the National Gallery: seventy-five paintings and fifty engravings among the best of his creations, from the early signs of his talent to his more recent works, donated generously and under no binding conditions to our museum. We cannot begin to express our joy and gratitude for this valuable legacy which now belongs to the Greek people. The National Gallery undertakes the responsibility of cherishing and promoting it.

Marina Lambraki-Plaka 
Professor of Art History
Director of the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum

* From the catalogue of Panayiotis Tetsis’s retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, Athens, 1999.